Sunday, 20 November 2011

On Friday the IPCC released the draft version of their new report: Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) PDF. The report relased is merely the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), the full scientific basis report will not be released until early 2012. Much of the text concerns vulnerability and exposure to the risks of climate change, although there is a shallow but useful summary of the observations and projections related to climate extremes. RealClimate have already done a post on the findings related to Tropical Storms. I'm not going to go over SREX in great detail but a few points from it relate to the recent Hansen paper discussed in my previous post.

Saturday, 12 November 2011

I'm facing another battle with scepticism. Previously when I was a sceptic of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) I just wasn't thinking critically. Now I think I'm thinking more critically, and the battle I face now is with the issue; Just how bad is AGW going to be?

Sunday, 6 November 2011

Catch-22, is a logical paradox arising from a situation in which an individual needs something that can only be acquired with an action that will lead him to that very situation he is already in; therefore, the acquisition of this thing becomes logically impossible.

To prompt worldwide concerted action to severely reduce CO2 emissions we need to have such clear evidence of a real and present danger that we are already committed to dangerous climate change. At the stage we have observations of massive climate disruption that is clearly outside of previous natural variability it will be increasingly hard for people to continue to turn a blind-eye to the problem, putting action off until evidence of a disaster is at hand will no longer be an option.

Thus it is a case of Catch-22: To prove the danger of climate change we need evidence, not only that climate change is underway and is likely to be disastrous, but conclusive evidence that climate change is a disaster. However to gain that evidence we would need to leave climate change to proceed to a point where we are experiencing the disaster. The problem with leaving climate change to proceed until we have clear and irrefutable evidence of a catastrophe is that by that stage it will be too late to avert further global warming and an intensification of the problem.